![]() ![]() “He lived for hardship,” the novel’s omniscient narrator tells us. He felt this was his right as a child of God.” Marek is zealous in his faith, a true masochist. ![]() He goes so far in his search for maternal connection as to nurse from the sheep: “He pushed the babes away and put his mouth to the sheep’s teat and sucked until he felt sick. “She had given her life for his own,” we learn, “like any good mother would do.” In her absence, Marek looks for a surrogate “mother” in anyone and everyone-from the old, witchy woman who nursed him when he was a baby, to the pregnant sheep he and his father tend to. ![]() “He was like a stray dog that wandered in and out of the village from time to time, and everyone knew he was a bastard.” Marek longs for his mother, a mute woman who, he’s been told, died in childbirth. “Nobody cared that Marek had come and gone,” Moshfegh writes. ![]() Lapvona tells the story of Marek, a “misshapen” social outcast in the small feudal town of Lapvona, where he lives with his brutish shepherd father. It is Moshfegh’s most daring and grandest novel yet, but in its grandiosity it also lacks the gravity that made her past novels so moving. Lapvona is beautifully constructed chaos, sure to evoke awe, discomfort, and lingering puzzlement in its readers. Ottessa Moshfegh’s newest novel, Lapvona, differs from the author’s usual intimate tales of wry, rough protagonists. ![]()
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